A plane carrying the first division Brazilian football club went down in Colombia on its way to Medellin.

A plane carrying Brazilian football club Chapecoense and an accompanying delegation of trainers and journalists crashed

 in Colombia on Tuesday on its way to Medellin.

A first division football club in Brazil, the Chapecoense team was travelling to Colombia to take on Atletico Nacional in the two-legged final - a match that will no longer be taking place. 

The club has been a success story in recent years, both on and off the pitch.

Based in the city of Chapeco, the Chapecoense organisation has been lauded as a model of financial restraint and common sense.

This season was the first time the club has qualified to play in the Copa Sudamericana - the continent's second tier club competition.

Formed in the 1970s, the team is not one of the more established names in the Brazlian game, and was only promoted to the country's top division in 2014.

On their way to the final in Medellin, Chapecoense beat major teams including San Lorenzo and Independiente from Argentina.

Lionel Messi's retirement that divided Argentina

Category>Football

"The Barcelona forward is one of the greatest to have have played the game. But his international career highlighted the fraught marriage between football and country"

It was 10 years ago that Messi made his World Cup debut. He was hailed as the great hope for a country that had already won two World Cups, a country in which football is central to notions of national identity. “Football has resonance everywhere,” Moores says. “But more here in Argentina, because it really is the one area in which we are a recognised force in the world.”

Lending credence to the idea that everything can be explored through football, a divided Argentina entered into endless discussions throughout the day. Young people said that, having missed the World Cup wins, they are more affected and hurt by Messi turning away from the possibility of giving them a taste of victory. Older fans explain in detail why a man who cannot deliver a trophy shouldn’t be so revered.

Opponents of the current government took comfort in the fact that the nation’s president, Mauricio Macri, would not pick up reflected glory from an Argentina Copa win, and pundits devoted much of the day to disseminating the many ways in which Messi ‘bottles’ it when it comes to delivering for his country.

Eminent thinkers discussed whether the bad karma is his alone or belongs to the whole squad, whether the curse is when he wears the strip or when he gets to a final.onight, all the political programmes on TV are about football,” Ezequiel Fernandez Moores, Argentina’s leading sports columnist, tells me from Buenos Aires. He has just returned home on the underground, and noticed that the arrivals board read “No te vayas Lio”: Lio, don’t go.

That phrase had been trending on social media since the early hours of Monday, when the Argentina captain announced, in tears, that he had quit international football after defeat in the Copa América final to Chile. Messi missed a penalty in the shootout and the result extended Argentina’s title drought to 23 years.

Chile is now South America's most dangerous team

Category>Football  














































































Football is strange. Chile are Copa América champions for the second time in their history ... and for the second time in the space of 12 months. And they beat Argentina in successive finals without scoring a goal. It was enough to force Lionel Messi’s shocking resignation from the national team.

 

But while much of the focus will now turn to Messi’s decision to quit, we should acknowledge Chile’s achievements. Both finals showcased a team who imposed their pace on the game and deserved to win: the games in Santiago and in New Jersey were played exactly as Chile wanted – with hard-fought, extremely intense football with no open space and no chance for some of the world’s most dangerous strikers to play freely. More importantly, it’s Argentina who changed their style in order to face Chile, not the other way around. Argentina were still cautious despite the 2-1 win over Chile in the group stages.

For Argentina, finals of major tournaments are clearly something of a problem: they’ve now lost seven consecutive finals: at the Copa América in 2004, 2007, 2015 and 2016, the Confederations Cup in 1995 and 2005, and the World Cup in 2014. Messi alone, as he stated after the game, has lost four. Worse, Argentina’s last goal in a final was Pablo Aimar’s in 2005, and it was merely a consolation in a 4-1 loss, followed by a 0-3 to Brazil (2007), 0-1 to Germany (2014) and two 0-0s against Chile (2015 and 2016).

With Brazil’s ongoing crisis and Argentina’s mental block in crucial games, Chile have become South America’s most dangerous side. If Brazil (used to) have jogo bonito, and Uruguay revered their garra (strength), Chile have become super-predators, acting like a pack of wolves rather than solo hunters. What starts as a tactical battle eventually becomes a mental one. And Chile don’t know the meaning of fear.